


What a piece of work is a man!

by kuonji



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:28:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24146647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuonji/pseuds/kuonji
Summary: She was staring again, he noticed.  Even if it made him slightly uncomfortable, he didn't blame the doctor.  How could he, when he still paused at odd moments of the day to poke at his own faux-time-wrinkled skin and test his lab-grown muscles?
Relationships: Jean-Luc Picard & Agnes Jurati
Comments: 12
Kudos: 14





	What a piece of work is a man!

She was staring again, he noticed.

Amid the flurry of goodbyes and taking off, there had been no leisure to attend to minor details and annoyances. Now, though, their course was laid and the ship was effectively running itself. They were coming off of the usual high of a planetary launch and had a stretch of pleasant (or boring, depending) nothingness to look forward to.

And now, like an insomniac, perambulating fool, instead of taking to his quarters, he had come here to the mess to find only one other crew member there, and now she was staring at him -- not the reflexive surprise of someone being accosted in an otherwise empty room, but a longer, more analytical, more... wondering expression.

Even if it made him slightly uncomfortable, he didn't blame the doctor. How could he, when he still paused at odd moments of the day to poke at his own faux-time-wrinkled skin and test his lab-grown muscles?

Several times throughout the day -- showering, walking, waiting in lifts -- he still found himself studying the shaped knuckles of his hands, counting the fine hairs, pressing his fingernails down and letting go, over and over, to watch the capillaries work. At night, he clenched his toes to feel the familiar tension transposed from his original body to this made one, but curiously minus the onset of arthritis that he had never made time to have removed. When he ran up the stairs, he put a hand over his racing, organically grown heart, and he marveled at the odd fact that he was possibly more human now in some ways than before.

Every time he looked in a mirror, he took a pause at the perfect visage he saw there. Perfect, that is, as a reflection of himself -- a wrinkled, bald man nearing the end of his natural life. Extraordinary, was it not?

Was it not?

_"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. In form and moving how express and admirable. ... And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"_

Jurati seemed to have noticed her own rudeness, because she dropped her curious gaze, too quick to be natural, and continued consuming her... was it chocolate cake? How odd. He hadn't found her to be partial to sweets. But then, he hadn't truly known her, had he?

Apart from those first meetings in her lab, her own comfortable bailiwick, he'd only ever seen her post what had been done to her mind and the emotional trauma caused by it and what that in turn had made her do and the trauma from _that_ and all the things following, a few good but many still bad.

Well, it was all a bit of a muddle, wasn't it? Speaking of 'minor details'...

Sighing softly, he made for the replicator. He noticed himself blinking faster in his perplexity, and he wondered if his resting blinking pattern now was still the same one used for Data. It made him feel closer to his old friend to think that it might be so, even though he knew, logically, that it almost certainly wasn't.

After all, he had _mucous_ now. His android membranes exuded bodily fluids, and those fluids included tears, which surely influenced how his eyes responded to the environment.

(Briefly, he was distracted from his train of thought by imagining how Kestra would react to seeing this version of 'him' again. They must visit on the way back and have a more purely sociable meal. Would the subtle charcoal crunch of the pizza crust taste and feel the same in his new mouth? Would the smell of lakewater and wild things still have the same quality to his new olfactory sensors?)

Yesterday, while overseeing the loading of the ship, a gust of wind had blown a speck of sand into his left eye. He'd rubbed at it instinctively, felt the sting, experienced the world blurring through protective tears just as his decades of living in a human body told him he ought to --

\-- and then he'd stopped and stared at the back of his hand, age-spotted, pored, veined, and sensitive to the breeze still passing. It was particularly sensitive, of course, because it was _damp_. Blinking rapidly to finish clearing the obstruction, he'd marveled at how completely natural both his body's autonomic reactions and his own physical actions had been.

She had stared then, too. Wiping away the last of his tears, he'd raised his head in time to see her watching him, her round face full of indulgent wonder.

He'd thought about speaking to her then, but Rios had interrupted him with a question about something or other, and by the time he'd turned again, Jurati was inside the ship, busy with whatever her own task had been.

Ignoring the fancier choices, he chose a cup of strong Earl Grey and -- in solidarity with his current company -- a slice of cheesecake.

"Good evening, Dr. Jurati," he greeted the momentarily astonished woman as he settled himself across from her.

"Oh. I suppose it is evening. It must be. All the lights are dimmed. I was reading in my room and felt hungry, and when I came outside, no one was up, and I wasn't sure if it was close enough to breakfast yet for eggs so I got this. I don't normally eat cake in the middle of the night, I promise."

Patiently, he waited out her babbling, understanding it for the nerves it was. "I suppose a working timepiece wasn't at hand, then?" At her alarmed look, he wondered if maybe the joke had been too much for their yet fragile understanding.

Thankfully, her stiffness crumbled away, leaving a soft laugh, disarmingly childish. "You're right. I didn't even look for one. I wonder why?" In that instant, she looked barely capable of holding a unique opinion, much less of murder.

(She was right. Unexpectedly, she had been quite an accomplished spy. No one had suspected her of being a double agent -- either when he had thought her loyal to himself, nor when the citizens of Coppelius had thought she'd belonged to them.)

"We've all been a bit distracted."

"Hm." Her smile wobbled, and she returned her attention to devouring her cake, taking two large mouthfuls before mumbling, "I don't suppose we get cake in prison."

"I should think they do, on special occasions. I doubt you'll find out, first-hand, given the circumstances." Jurati waved dismissively, but he overrode her half-formed verbal denial easily. "What was done to you could be easily classed as torture and coercion. Growing up almost exclusively around Earth humans, you may not have realized that, but the courts will."

She had done a terrible thing, yes. She had taken a life, that most precious of individual possessions, and she had done so with deliberation and forethought, to a man who had had every reason to trust her.

Yet, he could see now that it had been precipitated only by fear. Sheer terror, rather. Terror, intentionally implanted and cruelly used. The Romulan spy's story -- he couldn't really call their surprisingly civil conversations an interrogation -- had been illuminating.

"Narek said most people went mad, even prepared, when they saw what was forced upon you unawares."

Jurati shrugged, not looking up as she stabbed her fork into the remnants of her cake. "I'm sure she watered it down for me." Her voice trembled, even now, and he wondered again what exactly she had been shown.

Could his positronic brain make rational sense of the message now? Or would his human memories and transferred paths of thought make it into the nightmare that still haunted her?

"Even so." He could see he would make no headway on this subject. The matter would be resolved with time anyhow, so he wouldn't press. "Are you sad to leave Coppelius? It must have been your dream to live among synthetics."

She smiled, but with a bitter tightness to the corners of her mouth. "It would have been, even a month ago. Too bad the context kind of put me off." She sighed and looked hazily past his shoulder. "It was... surreal, though. Nice. I like knowing that Coppelius is there, like some kind of perfect garden. I'm glad the ban has been lifted, and I'm happy for the synths. They deserved better."

"But you never thought about staying?" She hadn't hesitated to leave. He couldn't tell if it was because she was eager to atone for her sins or if she truly hadn't wished to continue her work there.

Her eyes snapped to his in genuine surprise. "What? Of course not."

"You could have continued your work, with every resource and without the restrictions that hobbled you before. The synthetics even accepted you as a 'mother', didn't they? You would have had a place there."

He wasn't prepared for her fierce scowl. "I'm not their mother. That was a ridiculous thing for Dr. Soong to say. They were planning to _kill_ us."

"To save themselves."

"Not just us, us. _Everyone_ , us."

"And the Romulans were planning to kill every one of them, so from their limited point of view, it was much the same."

"Universal genocide, Admiral!"

"Yes, I'm on your side, remember. I was only pointing out--"

"All of us! Murdered! No, _exterminated_ , like vermin. Just like Oh warned me!" She shuddered, the horror of what her own words had recalled for her finally sobering her. "Anyway. As I was saying, I'm not their mother. I only went along with it to-- you know." She waved her fork in illustrative circles.

"Understood." 

Picard let her stare into space for a while. The cheesecake was quite good. It was a hefty slice, and he'd gotten a third of the way through before Jurati spoke again.

"You know the weird thing? Bruce and I debated about that once. I said that creating an android was like having a child, and he actually argued on the other side." She snorted. "Bruce always said he wanted children. I didn't know he meant he wanted a whole _planet_ of them." Sighing, she put her fork down and wrapped her hands around her mug. "I wonder how different things would have turned out if I had gone with him..." 

He took a sip of his tea and cleared his throat. "Dr. Soong isn't an overly humble man." 

"No, he isn't." She rolled her eyes and gave him a questioning look.

"Your work did contribute to the synths' invention. He would never have said so if it weren't true."

As he'd hoped, that teased a smile from her. "Fine, then. I was a... a donor of some kind." Her tone became more academic, her gaze more serious. "It really is different, you know, not being there when it happened. I'd be surprised if any of my original code or simulations went into the final constructions. The first simulations never survive reality, and I wasn't there to see the real world results, to change parameters, to test new theories."

She laughed, shaking her head.

"I'm not their mother, Admiral, no matter what Dr. Soong said. I wasn't there for when the others were built or when they woke up, not like the way I was for you."

He reared back slightly in surprise, and, apparently noticing what she'd said, she did the same in the other direction, abruptly enough that her curls bounced around her rapidly flushing face. "I didn't mean... That would be so silly. Really, it just came out wrong. I wouldn't--"

He held up a hand to forestall another waterfall of conscientious objections. She fell silent, and they were left to stare at each other in the dim quiet of lights-out.

Or... not so quiet, as it turned out. Footsteps approached them, and a quizzical voice asked, "Is this a game I can join in on?"

Jurati's lips twitched, and he found his own doing the same.

 _Mirroring_ , he thought. It was a building block for social intimacy. It also happened to be an effective way for androids to naturally pick up human mannerisms. And here was yet another android to learn their awkward human-ness from them.

"It seems," he said, lowering his hand and turning to look at Soji's head-tilted bafflement, "that Dr. Jurati sees me as--"

"Oh, please, don't say it."

"--her child."

While Jurati moaned, Soji sat next to her and patted her back soothingly. Unsurprisingly, the two neuroscience experts had become fast friends while Picard had been... away.

"I don't suppose one of you could explain that to me?" Her silvery eyes flashed between them.

Jurati waved her hands, as if trying to blow the topic away. "I _don't_ see him as my-- ugh. It's too embarrassing to even repeat it."

"Oh, because you helped create his current body?" Soji smiled, deducing the answer. "There's a certain logic to that."

Jurati huffed. "No, there isn't. It's so different. Wait a minute." Her gaze sharpened. "If I'm his mom, then so are you."

Now, Soji began looking flustered. "Oh no. We weren't talking about me."

As the two continued to bicker good-naturedly, he sat back and took a sip of tea. 

It was simultaneously rather sweet and somewhat hilarious to picture Jurati -- young, inexperienced, brilliant but naïve, and so very different from himself in almost every way -- as anyone's, much less _his_ , parent. He, at nearly a century old-- or, at least, the memory of such... What a farcical notion.

But perhaps he was selling her short. 

Fear, as he'd imparted to Jurati in the midst of a hopeless battle and a last gambit to save their civilizations from a shadowy horror, was an incompetent teacher.

He wished he had noticed earlier how troubled she'd been. He'd thought her skittishness was simply due to her first time being in space. He'd thought she was timid of strangers, fearful of technology not in her field. He'd treated her like a child that needed absent soothing, not an adult needing help with trauma -- not a legitimate danger to the ship and to the mission that needed to be defused.

At his age, sometimes they all seemed like children to him. It wasn't right to treat them like it.

There were many things he wished, in regards to his current company.

He needed to mend fences with Raffi. They needed to have a real relationship, not just what they'd thrown together under the smelting forces of necessity, then shared danger, and now relief. In the absence of natural-grown wine, he would need to find a better connection to make with his long ago subordinate officer.

Then there was Elnor. He badly needed a real mentor, not an absentee memory of a man he was grateful wasn't dead. Perhaps it wouldn't be Jean-luc, but the boy-- excuse him, the _young man_ needed someone. Rios? Seven of Nine, perhaps. They seemed to have formed the beginnings of a bond, and Elnor was used to answering to women and seeing one as an authority.

Rios needed a captain. He had said otherwise, but the way he looked at Jean-luc now... Jean-luc was forced to admit that he wasn't above enjoying the stroke to his ego, but he reminded himself that if he wanted to continue to enjoy the benefits of it, he needed to live up to expectations. He had to admit that he had never been the most orthodox of Star Fleet's officers. Could he be the mentor the younger man needed, and if not, what could he do for him instead?

And finally, Soji. Or perhaps, Soji, to start with. He had pushed her when it'd been necessary for Admiral Picard to act. Yet she, more than the others, was truly a child who had never had the joys of one. He wanted to take her home, to show her the painting her father had made. He ought to take her to where her sister had died, to let her properly mourn her twin -- the one truth she had known while enmeshed in lies.

Had he actually kept track of so many souls, so many complex, individual lives, when he had been the swashbuckling captain of the Enterprise? Or, in the arrogance of youth, had he only thought he had? What important things had he missed then and not known it?

Ah, Jean-luc. You try too much and succeed in too little.

He had no 'superpowers', but what he had was a fit body, a sound mind, and time on his hands with people he could make a difference to. That was enough.

"...if we isolate the pathways and do a microthermal scan, maybe we can see the beginning of the self-repair mechanism before they've gotten too far underway."

"Yes, and I know just the database we can use. I'll run a sorting algorithm to tag the right passages. There are a lot of similar references in pre-modern and early..."

He was brought back to himself by the two animated young women in front of him. Evidently, talk of synth motherhood had progressed in a more scholarly direction.

Soji was smiling -- a real smile, not a polite nicety or a determined grimace. Jurati looked relaxed, engaged, completely absorbed in their scientific exchange. She didn't look at Soji the way she had used to when they'd first met -- like Soji were an exotic object, perhaps an exquisite gearwork or a piece of art. She treated Soji now exactly as she would another person.

That gave him hope that she would stop staring at him soon.

\-- and that he might stop doing so, himself.

He didn't know what lay ahead for his second life, in this familiar, strange body. Some days, he didn't know quite how to feel about anything at all. What he did know, however, was that he was grateful for the chance to find out.

Fear was an incompetent teacher. Let their lives -- all of theirs -- be a better one.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story, you might try these:  
> [Turing Test](https://archiveofourown.org/works/428185) (Starsky & Hutch), by kuonji  
> [Descendants](https://archiveofourown.org/works/956480) (Due South, Battlestar Galactica), by kuonji  
> [Moving On](https://archiveofourown.org/works/252991) (Gundam SEED), by kuonji  
> [Dreams](https://archiveofourown.org/works/401534) (Stargate Atlantis), by kuonji  
> [not a star in the sky that's got our name](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23358322) (Star Trek: Picard), by cicak  
> [Love Comes Softly](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23434906) (Star Trek: Picard), by Be_Right_Back


End file.
